The Archive

THE SENATE

The World’s Slowest Body

It’s something Democratic and Republican senators — as well as staffers and reporters — can all agree on: The Senate takes way too long to vote.

Like way, way too long. Painfully long.

Publicly and privately, senators have been fuming over what they see as an inefficient process, especially when the chamber has multiple votes scheduled in a row. Individual votes are often held open for an hour-plus, prompting senators to leave the chamber to take meetings or attend committee business — or sometimes even decamping from the Capitol altogether.

The Senate process is especially jarring when considering that the House, a body with four times as many members, has been keeping its votes to as short as five minutes. This is a recent stunning turnaround under Speaker Kevin McCarthy following the proxy-voting era delays of 2020-2021. But now when the House says there will be a 15-minute vote and any follow-on votes will be five minutes, that’s what happens. The whole process is refreshingly brisk.

Across the Capitol, there’s little agreement on the best way to fix the Senate’s voting problem. Some senators complain that the chamber has reached the point of no return.

“Everybody’s against the long votes until you’re the one who’s in a hearing and simply can’t get away,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) noted. “I understand the reasons for long votes. It isn’t that people are out having a three-martini lunch. We’re busy. We’re supposed to be in five places at the same time.”

For starters, the incentive structure has changed. Senators’ schedulers have already taken into account the expectation that individual votes will be left open for an hour or longer, allowing them to set up meetings and other engagements for their bosses at the same time.

And some senators say they’re sometimes put in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between questioning a witness at a hearing and running to the chamber in order to vote, not knowing if they’ll be able to make it there in time. Senators who arrive on time have little reason to wait there for an hour until the next vote begins. So they’ll leave and come back later. Which drags the whole process out.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the longest-serving senator, told us that Senate votes used to last 15 to 20 minutes at most, and that senators “knew that they couldn’t wander all over the campus or downtown.” Grassley said “there’s no excuse” for the Senate’s current glacial pace of voting.

The obvious fix, many say, would be for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to declare that, no matter what, votes will close after a set period of time. Some senators have also suggested that a vote should be closed if the outcome won’t change.

Blumenthal, however, says that’s not realistic in the modern Senate and that his fellow senators will just have to learn to deal with it.

The duration of each Senate vote is ultimately up to the senator presiding over the chamber, who is usually a junior member of the majority party. Senators defer to party leadership, however, on when to gavel a vote closed. And the leadership has preferred to simply wait until every senator who’s in Washington and available to vote has done so.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) referred to it as a “senatorial courtesy.” But Hawley also argued that part of the problem is that the Senate isn’t voting as often as it used to, so party leaders feel comfortable dragging out individual votes. When votes occur more often, they tend to finish faster.

When Republicans were in the majority, Hawley often had to preside over the chamber. There was one particularly long vote that was held open for more than 10 hours to accommodate Democrats participating in a presidential primary debate in Florida. When Hawley was presiding, he decided — “for fun” — to indicate that he’d close the vote just to see how people would react. It caused Democratic cloakroom staff to scramble — before they realized Hawley was only joking.

The reality is, every senator who complains about the obscenely long votes would likely protest if a vote were closed before they had a chance to get to the chamber.

But others regularly take advantage of the existing system by arriving at the tail end of the first vote so that they can cast both votes back to back and not waste time waiting in the chamber. (You know who you are.)

For now, everyone is just going to have to channel former Sen. Bob Corker.

— Andrew Desiderio

BEHIND THE SCENES

Ahead of next week’s hearing, TikTok CEO blankets the Hill

One of the headline events on Capitol Hill next week will be the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s hearing onTikTok featuring the company’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew.

Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) scheduled that hearing – entitled “TikTok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children from Online Harms” – for next Thursday at 10 a.m.

Behind the scenes, Chew has been blanketing the Hill, meeting with members of E&C during the last few weeks, according to knowledgeable sources. One source familiar with his efforts estimated that Chew – a Singaporean native with an MBA from Harvard Business School – has met with every member of the panel except one. Rep. Frank Pallone (N.J.), the top Democrat on the panel, refuses to meet with witnesses before hearings, according to a source close to him.

Forbes reported Chew had been reaching out to members for meetings. This proactive approach isn’t unusual for a company under pressure from Congress, although the scale of Chew’s outreach certainly is.

Chew’s message to lawmakers is that U.S. users’ data is safe with the enormously popular Chinese social media app, and that the company isn’t under control of the Chinese Communist Party.

This will be one of the most consequential hearings thus far in the 118th Congress. TikTok has come under withering pressure on Capitol Hill over potential CCP access to American users’ data, no matter what the company says.

Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and John Thune (R-S.D.) introduced a bill that would create a process for the Biden administration to ban a social media platform like TikTok – the White House endorsed this legislation. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has a different bill which would ban TikTok outright.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee also approved a bill cracking down on TikTok. Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise have said that they’re in no rush to put a bill on the floor, however.

Here’s an item we did last week spelling all this out.

The White House is pushing ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owners, to sell the social media app. But our friends at The Information reported that the owners are in no mood to sell.

E&C will focus on everything ranging from safety on the platform to the security of the data collected by TikTok.

We’ll have much more on this next week.

The Coverage:

– Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan

THE LEADERS

ICYMI: Our third profile of The Leaders landed earlier this week. We featured Rep. Emilia Sykes (D-Ohio), a freshman and one of the youngest members of Congress.

Sykes represents a congressional district in Northeast Ohio, including Akron, that was once a booming manufacturing hub before factory jobs moved overseas. Now Sykes views the area as key to jumpstarting manufacturing in the U.S. Watch the full video of her interview here.

And if you hadn’t already, check out our earlier profile of Atlanta’s Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens who wants to turn the area into the tech axis of the South.

We also featured Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, who hopes his oil and gas state can also be a key producer of clean energy.

Check back in for our fourth and final profile of The Leaders in the coming weeks.

THE CAMPAIGN

New: Liberal advocacy group Facts First USA is running a digital ad slamming House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) for including Hallie Biden in his investigation.

“Cong. Comer is now even attacking a widow,” the ad reads. “Tell Comer: stop attacking dead veterans and their widows.” Watch the ad, which is running in D.C. and Comer’s Kentucky district, here.

Hallie Biden is the late Beau Biden’s widow. In a memorandum released Thursday, Comer details wire transfers made to Hunter Biden, James Biden and Hallie Biden. Comer wrote he was investigating “why Hallie Biden — publicly reported to work as a school counselor — received money from Robinson Walker, LLC.”

Facts First ran an ad on March 6 hitting Comer for bringing up Beau Biden on a podcast.

— Max Cohen

MOMENTS

9 a.m.: President Joe Biden will get his daily intelligence briefing.

10:30 a.m.: Biden will meet with Leo Varadkar, Taoiseach of Ireland.

11:45 a.m.: Biden will leave the White House for the Friends of Ireland lunch.

5 p.m.: Biden will host a reception for Varadkar at the White House.

7:30 p.m.: Biden will leave for Delaware.

CLIP FILE

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WaPo

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